Roarke decided to go left. Only a few people were to the right. None of them running or walking away from him. But to the left, there were two clumps of pedestrians. He could be in either one.
Roarke ran to the first group, keeping his gun out, but behind him. Not here, he said to himself as he passed the last man. He caught up with the second. Damn!
“See anyone running?” he asked.
No one had. He doubled back to the first group and asked the same question.
“No.”
Roarke stopped and calculated the possible escape routes. He quickly broke the street into quadrants and gave each a quick, but experienced, study. This took another fifteen seconds. There was no sign of Depp. Then he realized, because he didn’t come this way!
Roarke returned to the alley, looking for any door or window that might have been broken into. He found something even better: a service entrance to a building across from Starbucks. Roarke cursed his stupidity. He’d fallen for Depp’s deception. The trash can.
The door was not open, but it wasn’t locked. He went in, cautiously. The safety was off the Sig. He backed up against the wall and turned the corner fast, with his gun in the lead.
Clear.
He repeated the action through the second corridor, and the third, where a shriek echoed off the walls. A middle-aged woman saw a gun round the corner. Roarke quickly raised it into the air.
“Secret Service. Did you see a man come this way?”
“No!” she said, frozen in place.
Roarke looked around her. An elevator bank and a stairwell were ahead.
Another decision.
He chose the stairs, calculating the best place to get lost was higher up. With his gun still out, Roarke climbed. He contemplated opening the door to the second floor, then the third, but he decided on the fourth. Once through the door, he checked the offices, one by one, turning each doorknob. They were all locked.
The bathroom. Roarke entered quietly. The mirror provided an instant reflection of the urinals. They were empty. Further down, three toilet stalls. The doors were open to two. The very last one appeared closed.
Roarke walked slowly toward the back of the bathroom. He peered down, looking for shadows or motion. Nothing, but Depp could be standing on the seat.
He needed Depp alive. He didn’t know if he was armed, but he had to assume he was. Surprise was not an option.
“Secret Service! Come out now! Hands in the air.” He stepped silently to the side, away from where he shouted the orders.
No response.
Roarke crept closer, cutting an obtuse angle to the stall, hugging the wall where the urinals were. “Now!” he repeated. Once again, he moved away from where he spoke in case Depp aimed there.
He calculated that Depp couldn’t see him. He held his breath and listened for breathing or the shifting of weight on the toilet seat. He waited for thirty seconds and shook his head. Worse than hearing something was the absence of sound itself.
Roarke walked forward, barely sliding his neck around the partition. The door to stall three was only partially open, and at this angle, he could now see that no one was there.
He’d chosen the wrong floor.
At the same moment, a man one floor directly below Roarke adjusted his conservative blue-and-green-striped tie. He looked roughly 55. He pushed a pair of metal frame glasses into place, and ran his hand through his graying hair. He stood over six-feet. Then he let his body collapse into his suit. In that instant, he easily lost two inches. He exited the bathroom, walked to the far end of the hall, and stopped in front of a locked office. He reached in his right front pocket and removed a key, which perfectly fit the lock. He entered and immediately immersed himself in meaningless paperwork, which he’d also left the day before. Everything was as he’d left it in the rented efficiency office suite.
Roarke covered the next five floors as fast as he could. They were empty. By the time he made it up to eight, people were beginning to file in. Now he needed a team to locate Depp.
Reluctantly, he gave up. He walked down the stairs to the first floor and entered the lobby. No guard. No one to question. Roarke departed through the front door, crossed the street, and looked up and down Franklin one last time. He turned back to the building and looked up.
Two women were talking in a window on four. He could see a man on the phone on five. And on three, a businessman in a white shirt and suspenders was pacing with the phone in his hand. He was gesturing with broad movements, as if he was arguing with someone on the other end and looking out into nothingness. “Damn!” was all Roarke could manage.
The man pretending to be on the phone was thinking something entirely different.
Chapter 41
“Ten minutes out,” the voice announced calmly. “Target in range.”
JL Ricky Morris looked at his ops screen. “Roger that. You are go. Repeat, you are go.” Morris was the operation’s commander. He was on a live link to the lead pilot of the twin Royal Australian Air Force F/A-18Ds, carrying out the mission objectives. The attack was the work of the SASR, the Special Air Service Regiment. In addition to the real-time displays radioed back to the Swanbourne, Australia HQ, Morris had satellite imagery, courtesy of the Americans.
“Target acquired,” the pilot said with no hint of tension.
“We’re fully committed now,” Morris barely whispered to the man next to him. The prime minister’s defense secretary, Chris Wordlow, nodded acceptance.
The room fell silent as two Lockheed Martin F-35 (JSF) Strike Fighters closed the distance in seconds.
“Warning, attack command received.” This time the voice was from a computer onboard the lead F-35.
Come on, Wordlow mouthed. An SASR Tactical Assault Group (TAG) had located the terrorist base just days earlier. It hadn’t been all that difficult. Once the bomb squad disabled the device discovered in the Sydney hotel, the SASR analyzed the parts. Everything had its own history, and everyone who fused a bomb left a signature of his handiwork. Sometimes it was a fingerprint, other times the wire or solder was a giveaway. It could be serial numbers or the origin of the C-4. In this case, it was a combination of the markings on the explosives and the radio transmitter.
The device was amateurish and familiar, the work of a small insurgent group holed up in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia.
The Australian government had been watching the Solomons since the Bali bombings years earlier. Instability in the archipelago made it a natural habitat for terrorists. The Solomon Islands government invited “cooperative intervention.” Prime Minister David Foss willingly agreed. Intelligence determined that, while most of the terrorist cells operated in Indonesia, the 992 islands of the Solomons — some of them very isolated — provided terrorists with the same degree of shelter. Even worse, they were too close to Australia.
That’s where the group was hiding — one of the small islands off Rennell, to be exact. The TAG advance squad confirmed their identity and location, about 300 kilometers south of Guadalcanal. The Royal Air Force was going to do the rest.
“Attack commit,” the monotone computer voice stated.
“We’re going in with AGM-65 Maverick and AGM-88 HARM on the first pass. The knockout punch will come when we drop the GBU-12 Paveway laser-guided bombs,” Ricky Morris said without taking his eyes off the three computer screens.